Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [510]
The new policemen were salaried—all fees were abolished—and each was expected to make policing his only and full-time job. Preventing crime became as important as apprehending criminals. Officers assigned to surveillance were required to report “all suspicious persons, all bawdy houses, receiving shops, pawn brokers’ shops, junk shops, second-hand dealers, gaming houses, and all places where idlers, tiplers, gamblers and other disorderly suspicious persons may congregate.”
The 1844 state law, however, was merely permissive legislation. It was up to the city to accept it. Mayor Harper’s nativist administration, which took power after Albany acted, refused to ratify it. Instead, leaving the old system intact, the American Republicans added a body of two hundred men—native born and strictly temperance. Officially called the Municipal Police, they were known informally as “Harper’s Police,” as the mayor, not the wards, selected each man.
Harper also chose their wardrobe. The state law had explicitly rejected uniforms as a sign of despotic government, requiring only a star-shaped copper badge (hence “copper” or “cop”). Mayor Harper demanded a blue frock coat with covered buttons, a dark vest, blue pantaloons, and a standing coat-collar with the letters M.P. and a number in woolen embroidery. The men bitterly opposed the uniform, which they felt made them look like butlers. The public booed them in the streets, denouncing them as “liveried lackeys” of the nativists.
In 1845, when Democrats retook the city, they scrapped Harper’s Police and adopted the state law. Mayor Havemeyer, striving to establish a bipartisan department, appointed a political opponent, George W. Matsell, to be the first chief of police. Tammany men on the Common Council, having no such high-minded compunctions, promptly parceled out the eight hundred new positions to Democratic activists (some of them members of the new strong-arm gangs).
BOTTOMFEEDERS
Hard times had a golden lining for more than newly minted policemen. Indeed, the depression laid or strengthened the foundation for several of Manhattan’s foremost fortunes.
On May 14, 1837, August Belmont, aged twenty-three, arrived in New York City. His intention was to take the next boat to Havana, where he was to check on the Cuban interests of his employer, the House of Rothschild. Belmont immediately noticed the idle docks, the subdued streets, the general air of a city suffering from plague. He walked over to Wall Street to enquire of the Rothschilds’ American agents what was happening, only to discover that the House of Joseph and Company had folded its tent. An ambitious young man—he had worked his way up with the Rothschilds from errand boy to confidential clerk to private secretary—Belmont decided on the spot to set up as the Josephs’ replacement. Canceling his Havana trip, he rented a small room at 78 Wall Street and established August Belmont and Company, gambling on his employers’ approval. When the Rothschilds’ blessing arrived—along with a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, a fortune in shattered New York—he used Rothschild credit to buy up banknotes, securities, commodities, and property at severely depressed prices. With building lots going for a tenth of their former value, he could hardly help but flourish.
Unto those who already had, even more was given. Jacob Little, the notorious short seller, positively thrived during the crisis, reaping vast returns as the market plunged. John Jacob Astor, profiteer of calamity, snapped up land and houses at fire sale prices, spending over $224,000 in 1838 alone. At the same time, Astor ruthlessly foreclosed on hundreds of property owners who fell behind in their mortgage payments. Cornelius Van Shaack Roosevelt also accumulated land all over Manhattan during the panic years, betting it would rebound in value. Henry E. Pierrepont, whose proposed cemetery had been stymied